College is Good Because You, Like, Learn Stuff

Only 281 days until Election Day! This means
President Obama's proposals must meet a stringent three-point test
before they are unveiled to the public:

Will they help Obama get re-elected?

Will they help Obama get re-elected?

Will they help Obama get re-elected?

Any output from the White House these days is indistinguishable from
a campaign document. So I had (at best)
mixed feelings when the Upper Administration at the
University Near Here mass-emailed down to us Underlings a messsage
with the subject line "Suggested reading for all". Content was
a single URL: http://www.edweek.org/media/presagenda-blog.pdf.
Which (in turn) popped up a White House press release/campaign document:
(HTML
version here): "FACT SHEET: President Obama’s Blueprint for
Keeping College Affordable and Within Reach for All Americans".

So UNH is pushing us to read Obama's propaganda. Worse, it's not even
good propaganda.
If I may summarize: it's a gimmick-filled sop to those concerned about
runaway college costs. Convincing only to those who think that,
despite all evidence to the contrary, Your Federal Government
can do a effective job of making services more affordable.
Here's the opening:

In his State of the Union address, President Obama laid out a blueprint
for an economy that’s built to last – an economy built on
American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers,
and a renewal of American values. As an important part of keeping the
American promise alive, the President called for a comprehensive
approach to tackling rising college costs. In today’s global
economy, a college education is no longer just a privilege for some, but
rather a prerequisite for all. To reach a national goal of leading the
world with the highest share of college graduates by 2020, we must make
college more affordable.

… or: yet another Soviet-style
Five-Year Plan, meant to reassure the rubes
that Obama is Doing Something About It. Winning this game doesn't
involve providing useful services that people want; instead, a horde
of college bureaucrats will be amply paid for
jumping through myriad hoops that a horde of government bureaucrats
will be amply paid to think up. Losers: students, parents, America.

A telling indicator of how much care went into preparing the document:

o The President is also proposing to begin collecting
earnings and employment information for colleges, so
that students can have an even better sense of the post
post-graduation outcomes they can expect.

For more amusement on the same topic, perhaps typical of
the response of higher educators to the plan,
you might check out the "Dear
President Obama…" "open letter" composed for Inside Higher
Ed by Professor Robert J. Sternberg of Oklahoma State Univerity.
It is in the form of ten supplications to the Great Leader. I think
I can summarize them down into four general pleas:

Please don't make us do anything we don't want to.

Please don't try to measure how well we're doing our jobs.

Please don't look too closely at how we're spending money.

Please keep the money flowing.

Check it out; am I being too harsh?

In loyal opposition to increased socialization of higher ed is Neal
McCluskey at Cato. Worthwhile reading, especially his conclusion:

[…] if the president really wants to rein in costs he will call
for significanlty reducing student aid, both the amount available to
individual students, and the numbers of students eligible.

That, though, will probably not happen. Not only did the president talk
up keeping aid cheap and casting an even wider net in his State of the
Union, but taking the right course — cutting aid — means taking
the politically tough course. And neither this president, nor almost
anyone else in Washington, has ever signalled real willingness to do
that. It’s just much easier to keep giving money away.

Or: if you think higher ed is overpriced now, just wait until President
Obama is done making it more "affordable."

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

If geeks were to play their own version of David Lodge's "Humiliation"
game, here would be my entry: I never got into the oeuvre of
Douglas Adams at all. But this book showed up
on this
list of the "Top 10 Greatest Science Fiction Detective Novels Of All
Time", and so …

I've not had the best results from that list. I'll keep trying.

The protagonist is young Rich MacDuff, software engineer working
on applications for "WayForward Technologies" and its boss, Gordon Way.
His current work is on a program that represents business data not in
boring old spreadsheets and graphs, but in music. He has a sofa in his
apartment that got stuck on a staircase; it's apparently impossible to
move it further upward. More mystifyingly, it's also impossible to
reverse the moves that got it into that position.

Rich is invited to attend the annual reading of Coleridge's poem ""Kubla
Khan" at his alma mater, St. Cedd's College. He meets up with his old
professor "Reg", who holds the position of "Regius Professor of
Chronology". Originally established by George III, "to see if there
was any particular reason why one thing happened after another, and if
there was any way of stopping it." During their discussions, a horse
turns up in Reg's bathroom. Did it come in the window?

In the meantime, Gordon Way, Rich's boss and the brother of Rich's
girlfriend is murdered. Rich winds up a suspect, and that's where
the titular Dirk Gently comes in. Can he pull together these
various odd things into a coherent explanation?

You get the point: it's pretty silly. Adams' style hits a lot of comic
bases: he's ironic in spots, witty in others, surreal in still others,
… There are (probably) a lot more. I chuckled a lot more near the
beginning of the book than I did near the end. The "look at how clever
I am" schtick apparently doesn't work over a whole 300+ pages.
And there's an additional irritant
in Adams' "anything goes" plot; when anything goes, nothing really
matters.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

A tragic tale of how well-intentioned scientific hubris can
lead to … well, see the title.

James Franco plays Will, a scientist working desperately hard for a
soulless corporation so he can come up with an Alzheimer's cure for his
dad (John Lithgow). He tests it on primates, of course. Results
are promising, but early demo goes disastrously
wrong, and the company demands the primates be put down. Will, however,
saves an exceedingly bright infant chimp, bringing him home,
and naming him Caesar. Oh oh.

Things go less than smoothly; an altercation between Will's hothead
neighbor and Will's demented father blows up into violence and Caesar
gets incarcerated in a primate facility. The keepers put up a humane
front for the outside world, and manage to deceive Will, but internally
it's a Hobbesian nightmare where the apes are brutalized. Caesar,
understandably, plots revolt.

There are a lot of nods to the original classic movie series, some
subtle, some not so much. (Will someone say "Take your stinking paws off
me you damn dirty ape!"? Yup.)

Lots of actors caused the "where have I seen them before" reaction.
Fortunately, there's IMDB to provide near-instant relief.
Will's hapless lab assistant, Franklin? Oh, yeah: he was Dale, in
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. And that sadistic keeper at the primate
facility turned out to be Tom Felton, aka Draco Malfoy in eight Harry
Potter movies. Is he doomed to play psychotic creeps for the rest
of his career?

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